Suspicions that the police have started a new criminal investigation into The Pirate Bay were confirmed by the Swedish hosting company Binero today. Police have requested the company to reveal the personal details of the customer who registered The Pirate Bay domain name. Sources say that the new investigation is a renewed attempt to shut the popular BitTorrent site down.

Last week the news leaked that Swedish prosecutors have started a new criminal investigation into The Pirate Bay.

The assumed goal of the new effort is to shut the site down, something the authorities failed to accomplish during the first investigation more than half a decade ago.

Initially, the only source for the new investigation was The Pirate Bay team itself. Today the plans were confirmed by the Swedish hosting company Binero where two of The Pirate Bay’s .se domain names are registered.

“We can confirm that an investigation is underway against the Pirate Bay. We received a letter with questions,” Binero’s marketing manager Erik Arnberg said.

In addition, the hosting company also made it clear that they won’t be complying with the requests unless a proper warrant is served. According to Arnberg this hasn’t happened thus far.

“We will not share any information about our customers until there is a court order, or when a prosecutor can refer to an applicable law. In this case, we have answered the questions with information that’s already available through Whois services.”

The Whois data for the Pirate Bay’s new .se domain lists the name of Fredrik Neij, one of the defendants in the original trial who was sentenced to 10 months in prison.

The exact goals of the new investigation are unclear. The prosecution, led by piracy investigator Frederick Ingblad, confirmed that they “are interested in torrent sites” but refused to comment further. It is expected that the Swedish authorities want to finish what they failed to do in 2006, shut down The Pirate Bay website for good.

However, considering the current state of the site that’s pretty much an impossible task.

In recent years The Pirate Bay has implemented a variety of changes to guarantee that can remains online, whatever happens. It added several backup domains, placed servers all over the world, while removing resource intensive components such as the tracker and .torrent files.

The determination to keep the site online was once again confirmed by the Pirate Bay team last week, who noted:

“We’re staying put where we are. We’re going no-where. But we have a message to hollywood, the investigators and the prosecutors: LOL.”